He put his arm around her shoulders, and this time she didn’t push him away, shivering. In the exultation, none of them had paid much attention to the fact they were all getting soaking wet.
One of the pilots shown a flashlight down the strip, in the direction they had come from in their landing. “I’m going to go see if there’s a sign or building or something we didn’t make out.”
He headed that way.
“Come on,” Mason said to Camilla. “Let’s go back inside for a minute where it’s dry.” He turned to the remaining pilot. “Okay to go sit back in the plane, while we figure out what to do here?”
“Hang on a minute, sir, until the captain comes back. We want to make sure she doesn’t blow.”
“What?” she cried in alarm, her fingers clutching at Mason’s jacket, as all three of them moved farther back from the plane at the possibility.
“We don’t think it will,” the pilot added hastily. “The wings were roughed up a little from the tree tops as we came down, but the gas tanks weren’t punctured, and there was no sign of leaking fuel, so it looks like the readings must have been faulty. And of course no fires broke out. She’s shaken, but she’s okay.”
He could have been talking about Camilla on that last one.
Mason hugged her closer to him.
“I’d just rather check with the captain,” the pilot said, “before we get back in. And if there’s some other shelter around here, it might be better to, ah… But if not, we’ll go back on board.”
“Fine. We understand.” Mason surveyed the view in the distance, the captain no longer visible, black closing in beyond the lights of the plane, slashes of rain all around them, and certainly no buildings that he could see. Just woods and a lake and the long gravelly strip they had landed on, a makeshift runway perhaps for air deliveries to wherever the hell they were. Or it had once been. Now there was nothing. He shook his head and shivered a little in the cold air. It was a fucking miracle they were alive.
She stared at him intently as the captain came back, shaking his head. “Nothing but a battered old sign with some kind of word on it I didn’t recognize, Indian maybe, and the remains of a shed, a hangar I guess, but I didn’t see anything of further use in it. No radio or anything.” He waved a folded sheet of something. “There was a map of Nova Scotia, though, so we can take a look at this.”
“Okay to go back into the plane?” the other pilot asked him.
“Yeah. Let’s do that,” the captain answered.
“It’s safe?” she said. “It won’t blow up?”
“No, it should be fine.” The pilots stepped back into the plane, but when Mason tried to urge Camilla, her feet seemed firmly planted on the ground.
“If it was going to blow up,” he assured her, “it would have already done it by now. Probably on descent.”
He managed to shepherd her back up and into the lit plane, the pilots closing the door behind them, shutting out most of the sound of the rain.
Mason led her to the seats they had been in for the landing, then grabbed a blanket that had tumbled out of the overhead and draped it over her shoulders as they sat down, side by side. He held her hand, which was ice cube cold. “Rest a minute. Just take a deep breath. Do you want a glass of water?”
“I’m fine. I’m good.” Her voice sounded stronger, and she bent her head into the crook of his arm, then laughed, a sound that started out kind of off, but ended more naturally, in pure unadulterated…well, something.
One of the pilots, shit he could not remember either of their names, but he thought it was the captain, spread the map against an overhead as they consulted it, conversing in low tones.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Well, since the radio went out along the way and some of the instruments failed, we can’t tell exactly where we are,” one of them said while the other nodded. “But that sign out there was a help after all. It looks like we landed considerably south of Halifax, in a state park called,” he paused and read from the map, “Kejimkujik. That’s what was on the sign. This must have been some kind of a landing strip for supplies, undoubtedly planes a lot smaller than this one, so we really lucked out that we made it down safely.”
“Luck, hell, Boyd, that was some fancy flying!” His co-pilot slapped him on the back.
“I second that,” Mason agreed. “But how far is this park from civilization?”
“Says here the total area of the park is about one hundred and fifty six square miles. Unfortunately, we’re not exactly sure where we are in it, and with the storm and cloud coverage on the descent, we couldn’t see much in terms of nearest cluster of lights, which might’ve given us some indication of the direction to head.”